Month: August 2018

He would explain that my writing was ‘fatty’ — I was saying everything twice and I had too many adjectives. He said it was also occasionally ‘clotty’ — it was imprecision he was talking about, an effort to use a … Continue reading →

After all the obits I’ve read for “VS Nightfall” (as Walcott called him), the following few words in the New Statesman made me gasp: The opening sentence of VS Naipaul’s A Bend in the River is memorable: “The world is … Continue reading →

A 12 mile subterranean (submarestial?) lake Kubrick excelled himself on this one.

Mid-Atlantic writer Jesse Armstrong on the lonely, obsessive, feuding, litigious life of billionaire Summer Redstone: “The Redstone stuff is either tragic or good material – depending on whether you’re a human being or a writer.” Yes, we’re a horrible parasitic … Continue reading →

BBC4 in the UK has a new series in which the movie critic’s movie critic Mark Kermode deconstructs the tropes and structures of films he likes and/or admires. Each week he takes a different genre – the coming of age, … Continue reading →

The always reliably NSFW Australian cartoonist Oglaf is, in her way, an astute literary theorist. Here she is on the meaning of tragedy.